Explorers Tweaks

Lusternia has expanded enormously over the years, adding huge numbers of rooms to itself. As it does, each rank of Explorers begins to require more actual rooms reached to attain. In general, all that this means is that guilds with an explorer rank task need to occasionally adjust the required rank downwards, but at the upper end this leads to a few pressures & potential problems.
One of the biggest is the drive to "break in" to closed areas- not to actually look around or see the rooms, but specifically to increment a behind-the-scenes counter. This includes guildhalls and Divine temples, both of which are intended to be pretty private to a small group of individuals (much like the suggested Homesteads).
For guildhalls, a popular technique is to check WHO regularly until you spy a novice in a guildhall and try teleporting to them. If there is a lack of a monolith, you are able to abuse the ignorance of the novice to run around. For Temples, it is more popular to use an ability that can teleport you to a random room in the area (since the entrance area is small in relation to the rest of the temple the odds of success are enormous).
I think that a couple of simple tweaks could address this, and also cover Homesteads without needing to flag each Homestead individually as uncountable for explorers.
1) Set each Prime org territory to not count for explorers (immediately removing guildhalls, homesteads, arenas, and any future expansion from requiring invasion specifically for the numbers)
2) Set Divine Temples to not count for explorers (let the Realms still count, to encourage exploration)
Ar this point, breaking into these private places would no longer be a "requirement" but instead something done only if you are really interested in that location. You also reduce some of the total room count, making it a bit easier for an individual to gain ranks.

Comments

This is not a good idea, although I do sincerely understand the arguments behind it.

The
only way to top explorers is to visit all the rooms (or their
equivalent) that everyone in front of you has already visited, and then
visit additional rooms. At the top ranks, this pool consists more or less entirely of private rooms.

Unless you are going to revamp the rankings entirely - removing all credit for rooms which are no longer available to explore, including these private rooms, one-off event rooms, old temples, etc. - then removing rooms from contention at this point will create a situation in which the people who already top the rankings are completely secure in them indefinitely - provided they show up long enough to do a quick walkthrough when a new public area is opened. Even then, they would have to be big areas to be of much consequence.

If you did redo the rankings, we'd probably have something like an 8 way tie for first, or at the very least, less than 10 rooms difference between all the top people.

If I recall correctly, Battlechess Arena rooms were removed from the rankings and the credit taken away. I don't feel any particularly way about explorer rankings, but it does sound like a decent idea to me. Prime Org territory definitely is reasonable in my eyes. Inner temples, guild halls and places such as council rooms are not.

I, personally, wouldn't mind if some areas were cut off from exploring. Specifically guild halls and temples and event rooms. The former two because those areas are specifically designed to belong uniquely to one specific group, and to have them counted for explorer ranking is an invitation for novice abuse. Unique one-time event rooms that are only open for a short time should likewise be removed as it removes the inability for anyone who starts today to ever reach the number 1 spot.

Post edited by Kiradawea on November 2013

Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

There are already a number of areas which are still in the game and are now completely inaccessible - the largest of these that I know about being Eventru's realm and temple. They can still be entered from aetherspace but you immediately get kicked out.

The inner temple itself is HUGE and contains a number of unlinked areas which are only accessible using a Hamster Dingbat artifact (retired) or Paradigmatics Reality.

Since this area is still in the game but inaccessible I'd guess that the top 5-10 explorers are now unbeatable. I also think there may be a few small areas which are still in the game but inaccessible - the tower which sank in the Iceburn Plains during the Zenos event was still in the game 3-4 weeks after the event (I kept my hound in there so I could BOND LOOK and BOND UNITE to get inside). It's still accessible by a very lucky use of a dingbat hamster but you also need to divinefire immediately if you get inside as it has an instant death feature.

I've gotten most of my guildhalls from outright asking permission, trading tours of respective guildhalls or attempting to teleport to everyone and everything. Guildhalls and org territory should remain since they give me something to aim at for new explorer ranks.

I've done pretty much everything in divine inner temples, I'm likely missing a room or two here and there. Same for the prime plane, mostly guildhalls and the odd extremely obscure rooms which exist in certain areas.